Reviews, rants, opinions, and video games.

We’ve all heard the same phrases over and over, “it’s a smash bros clone”, “why play that when you have smash bros”, “sony wanted to cash in on the genre”.

I had my doubts about the game, I watched some gameplays and it seemed fun enough for me to want to try it out, PS+ granted me that chance and I took it. I’m glad I played the game, people seem to nitpick at every single flaw the game has without looking that the core gameplay is still fun. One thing I can say for sure is that the game will never reach Smash Bros competitive status online or on tournaments, but that’s alright, the game is excellent at casual multiplayer fun, I’ve spent several hours on my PS3 with friends, battling over and over.

It still has enough to differentiate itself from SSB, the main thing being Super Attacks needed to kill opponents, a great mechanic that rewards patience, you need to be careful, and you need to think whether to do a LVL 1 Super Attack and risk being blocked, dodged or interrupted, or wait for a more safe LVL 2, it adds more strategy and timing to the battles. I like that every character has its own level that get you unlockables for that character (although I hate that you can’t level up while playing with a friend to prevent boosting).

It still has its cons, my main problem is that 1v1 games are a pain in the ass, they take way too long, it takes time to charge a LV2 Super, while LV1 are avoided easily and going for them is pointless most of the time, but 4 player FFA is a lot of fun. Some items are way overpowered (ice bomb), some stages are annoying as hell (uncharted plane), and you can’t play Arcade mode disabling these two annoyances. The best characters in the game are DLC (Kat and Isaac Clark).

I know people still hate it, either because some consider it a rip-off and don’t even give it a fair chance, or people who gave it a chance and still weren’t pleased, I can’t blame any of them, but in my opinion, it still is a fun game to play with some friends, or even to kill some time.

First of all, I have to say two things: This is an opinion made with no experience of the game besides the Demo (which obviously doesn’t have Little Mac), and second, Little Mac is my favorite newcomer to the franchise.

A double-edged fighter.

Now, with that said, I was astonished by Lil’ Mac’s playstyle when gameplays of the game appeared, his speed, his damage, his special K.O. ability, he looked like the perfect character, but there is a blatant fault to balance him out, he is worthless mid-air, and when he is launched out of the stage, his side special and up special don’t really help him get back. Still, people are complaining everywhere about how “Overpowered” he is, and, it may sound harsh, but those are complains from people who don’t know how to deal with him, don’t try to experiment or get better to counter the character, and specially when Little Mac’s main weakness are grabs, a move that most of the beginners to the game don’t use.

I won’t say it is easy, dealing with a skilled Little Mac player can end up in defeat pretty quickly, I’m going to use a boxing ideology to this: to win against a foe, you have to make him fight on your terms, this applies to Super Smash Bros too. When Mac is on the edges of the stage, that’s the moment you have to exploit his weakness, normally they would stay on the center of the stage to avoid it, and here is when grabs come in handy, throwing him repeatedly off the stage, and then hitting him can be a secure KO for you, specially if you have heavy hitting projectiles like King DeDeDe’s spikes, Duck Hunt Dog’s can or even a kicked fire hydrant from Pac-Man. I’ve seen several replays on youtube when even skilled Little Mac’s player lose pathetically because their opponent knew how to exploit his weakness, those videos normally went “Game starts, player A doesn’t moves from his side of the stage, Little Mac dashes and punches, player A dodges or blocks, then grabs and throws Mac off the stage, when he tries to get back, player A hits or throws him of the stage, rinse and repeat until KO”.

I don’t really think Nintendo is going to balance him, specially with such a huge weakness, maybe they’ll just shave off some damage points to his attack to try and listen to the players, but that would be it. I’m against any nerfing done to him, he requires skill to play him right, and it requires skill to defeat him, just like any other character in the game or in any other fighting game.

The Mobile video game market is an open universe with endless possibilities and monotony at the same time, you can find extremely original and never before seen games from rookie studios, or you can find the same game over and over with just some little changes, mostly visual. That’s the puzzle genre in a nutshell (in mobile games) all the famous ones revolve around the “match-three”, bejewled clones, and that’s where 100000 comes in. EightyEight Games’ entry on the genre is a good one, adding some adventure/RPG elements to the mix, some might consider it a Puzzlequest clone, but it has enough to difference it, including the fact that it isn’t a 1v1 battle. You’re an adventurer trapped in a dungeon and you can only escape if you achieve 10.000.000 points in a single run, something that seems impossible the first times playing the game, but the further you explore the dungeon, the more you upgrade yourself.

Instead of your regular colored tiles from the regular “match-three” games that only give you points, tiles here are associated with an action that occurs when your match 3 or more of them, those tiles are:

Sword/Wand: Deal damage to the enemy, the more tiles you match, the higher the damage.

Shield: Gives you shield points that block damage, more points with more tiles.

Key: Opens locked chests and doors, match 4 or more to open more than one lock at the same time.

Backpack: Has a chance of giving you an item, match more than 3 tiles to increase that chance.

Wood/Stone: Gives you that material, used to upgrade buildings, matching more than three grants you more material.

Star: This tile can be used to match any combination.

All the possibilities…

Everything in the game is upgradable, to the point it becomes an addiction, giving you incentive to complete quests and use that gold to upgrade your equipment. You have 4 types of equipment:

Shield: You can upgrade the maximum quantity of shield points you can have, and the amount of shield points matching those tiles give you.

Armor: You can upgrade your damage resistance and increase the attack delay on enemy attacks.

Aside from those upgrades, there are other two other buildings in your cave: a trainer, where you can use your EXP earned from killing monsters to get abilities, and a potion shop that unlocks a potion every time you go up a rank, you can toggle them to have cool effects while doing a run, but have some nasty side effects like “Receive 20% of Wood and Stone as Gold. Gain 0 Wood and Stone”.

Some smiting, crafting, training and dungeoning after a good night’s sleep.

There’s no “life bar” in the game, instead, your time left serves as your life bar, and it’s represented with your position onscreen, if you touch the left border of the screen, it means your time ended and so your run, you can gain time by killing monsters or eating food you find in treasure chests, and notice that enemies also damage your time left, making your run end faster.

It is worth noticing that the game has a simple yet catchy soundtrack with retro game tunes and dungeon vibe, great for adventuring and killing monsters.

Veredict: A-

Now, all exposition aside, let’s view the package as a whole. For only 2.89 US$ you’re getting a great deal, I’ve played this game for a lot of hours and haven’t gone through all the upgrades and ranks, the game keeps getting harder so it won’t lose the challenge and you don’t get bored. One of the things I love the most is that the game doesn’t have micro-transactions, the bane of all mobile games, even paid ones have this bullshit, and the developers could have added it in 1000000, “oh, you don’t want to play an hour or two and have fun to earn the gold necessary for that upgrade? Just pay 4.99$ and get it right away”, you get rewarded for your gameplay, getting better with your skills and response time, and also materials to enhance your abilities inside the game. I recommend it to anyone who wants something different from the monotony of mobile puzzle games. I’m still baffled that this is Eighty Eight’s only game on the Google Play Store, I wouldn’t mind a 10000000 2 *hint* *hint*

We can’t deny the effect that Persona 3 and 4 had on gamers, most call them the best J-RPGs ever (debatable opinion), they get a lot of attention from their creators and fans, appearing in almost all kind of medias. But people always forget that there are other Persona games before those.

For people who played Persona 3 or 4 first, getting into Persona 1 is kind of difficult, the game has changed a lot over the years, to the point that most people wouldn’t think they are related if it weren’t for the title.

I’ve been a Shin Megami Tensei fan for several years, but I didn’t get introduced to the main series. My first game was Devil Survivor on the DS and the first thing I discovered with that game is that Megaten games are hard, then I played Persona 3 and enjoyed it a lot, specially the social links, and how they affect the game. Some time passed and I got curious about the franchise, and made a research to see the previous Persona games on the PSone and didn’t like them, the things I enjoyed from the sequels weren’t there, and to me, they didn’t have that “Persona” feel like the third one, but after some thought I gave the Persona PSP remake a chance since they tried to make it more appealing to gamers who got introduced to 3 and 4 first (mostly by getting Shoji Meguro as the composer, and updating the UI).

The game starts with you and your classmates in a classroom trying a game called “persona” where you try to summon a ghost girl, after some skepticism, the girl actually appears and everyone gets struck by lightning, upon waking up they go visit their sick classmate, Maki, after their visit, an earthquake occurs and the hospital shapes into a labyrinth with hostile creatures called demons, and they find out they can summon “personas” which they can use to fight these demons.

Battles are done in a classic RPG style with some “positioning” elements, for example, your party can be set in a square grid, and depending where you put them, some attacks may or may not reach the enemies, it is kind of annoying at first, but when you get a feeling on where you should put everyone, and specially with firearms having more range than melee weapons, figuring out the position of everyone is a fun mini puzzle (in my opinion). Only three people can be put on the very front line, since they have to be a square apart from other characters, and when you get spells that attack globally, it is pointless. But what dominates most of the combat are Persona skills, and for those used to the few elements of newer Megaten games (Fire, Ice, Wind, Electricity, Almighty), here, there are Gravity, Ground, Blast and Nuclear (which are now called almighty, but before they could be resisted/drained/repelled) attacks, also, Nuclear attacks are WAY overpowered against enemies that don’t resist it. By the way, it is important to press start during battles to skip animations if you want to complete this game in less than a year (they take way too long).

As for the graphics, I have to say, I like that they didn’t update all of them, I like the character sprites and the first person dungeon crawling graphics, I’m glad they updated the world map, the PSone first person navigation was extremely confusing and slow, in the PSP remake, they changed it to a Shin Megami Tensei Nocture kind of world map, in which you are a marker and move through the map, that saves time.

The music is a hit or miss, I really like it to the point I have the opening, battle and boss battle themes on my cellphone. They are your regular Shoji Meguro’s J-Pop/J-Rock, people often complain about them being repetitive, specially the battle theme (A Lone Prayer) that plays every single time you fight, but I don’t hear that complain in Persona 3 and 4, in which the same issue happens, in fact, people like hearing those songs over and over, well, that’s my case with this soundtrack. It really depends on music taste.

As for changes from the PSone version to this PSP remake, the first change was to eliminate all the localization bullshit that the PSone release had, so no black Mark, no english names, no censorship of demon names and specially, no translation mistakes. They also reverted the low encounter rates and high money rewards from battles that the PSone USA release of the game had, so the difficulty was set back to Japanese standards. And what got more hype for its release: The Ice Queen Quest was added and translated, adding more content. Also they added very well done CGI cutscenes to tell several parts of the story, obviously the music by Shoji Meguro, new and easy to navigate user interface and a suspend function to save outside a save room with a suspend savefile.

Now that I addressed the good things, it is time to talk about the problems:

1- Balance: If you can get your hands on a persona with a nuclear attack, you can pretty much breeze through this game (specially Gozu-Tennoh, that persona is crazy overpowered, huge attack stat and comes with Megidola), except in the end game when it is practically required that you get the ultimate personas for each character, the only times where the game can be a challenge is when you face enemies who repel magic or resist nuclear attacks, and obviously, boss battles, most of them are just damage sponges and some come with annoying 1-hit KOs.

2- Level design: There’s no thought put into the dungeons and levels, they look like someone just made random lines on a paper and decided to put them in the game. Sometimes they change the formula a bit with trap tiles, holes in ground dropping you to a lower floor, automated floors that make you walk automatically, with the sense of incorporating a “puzzle” element to the dungeons, but there is no such thing, it is just an annoyance that make you waste more time and you have to keep in mind avoiding them in the future.

3- Status conditions: This is the single most annoying problem of the game, a problem that almost made me break my PSP, status conditions can stack,at first you would think that it would be awesome, but it isn’t, using status conditions on enemies is worthless, the accuracy of those spells is low, and you’re just making the battle unnecessary longer because you could just have attacked and the battle would have ended. What is most annoying of the status conditions is when the enemies use them on you, specially since those demons come in herds, and all of them do a global status change spell, resulting in your party getting charmed or put to sleep, and the demons keep repeating these attacks, adding a stack to that status condition, eventually making it last another turn, over and over and over, to the point no one in your party can act, and you’re just pressing “escape” each turn in hopes that the game decides you had enough.

4- Escaping from battles: I wouldn’t have a problem with this issue, but the status conditions make this really annoying, because you only have 10% chance of escaping from a battle, I don’t know why they went with this design choice, but I can say it was just for the sake of being a “old school hard J-RPG”.

5- Bad Ending: I simply despise when games do this, specially when you don’t see it coming. Let me explain how this is done in the game: at several boss battles and moments in the game, someone will ask you a question, and depending on how you answer, it will determine if you get the bad ending that cuts the game abruptly with a stupid anti-climatic cutscene or you get the good ending, please note that you have to answer correctly to ALL these ambiguous questions to get the True Ending, and ALSO note that you don’t get feedback if your answer was correct or wrong to the game standards, so you would need a guide to achieve the real ending. If you answer correctly, you get several more hours of gameplay, experience the rest of the game and get to unveil the truth of the story and get to the real final boss. This is frustrating specially since the first time I didn’t know there was a bad ending, and since there is no New Game+ option, you have to play the game from scratch.

6- Negotiating with demons: This a trademark of the franchise, but in all honesty, it was done poorly in this game. Demons have 4 “bars” (more like triangles) when negotiating with them: Angry, Happy, Eager, Scared. Filling all of them except angry will end up in something positive for you (the demon gives you an item, money, heals you or flee), but the most important reward is getting their demon card, which you can fuse with another one and create a persona, and to get one, you need to fill the Eager bar, which is quite the challenge since demons in this game are unpredictable, you can’t use reason to figure out a way to approach each demon, specially with so many options to do so (each character has 4 interactions, like “Bribe”, “Dance”, “Invite, “Sing”, etc) so it ends up being a simple trial and error that ends up in more failure than anything else.

Veredict: B-

Still, with all its problems, I can’t bring myself to hate this game, I can’t explain why, but this game has a charm that makes me want to play more and more, it might be the worst persona game of the series, but I still like it. Maybe I can qualify it as a “guilty pleasure”, in fact, it is the only PSP game I have with a Special Edition, I needed to have Meguro’s work on my hands that bad.

This blog was born due to, let’s call it like that, “a failed dream”. That dream was to be a youtuber and make the same things I do here but in video form. Sadly, I came to the realization that it was going to be a lot more difficult. I lacked the equipment, the software and specially the presence, because I qualify myself as a shy person, uploading a video of me to the internet isn’t really pleasing to my mind. So I chose the next best thing: a blog. The first thing you need to know about me is that english isn’t my mother languange, you might be asking “then why is the blog in english?”, well, two reasons, first, I want to practice it more, and second, this way I can reach to more people, so if you spot a typo or error on my redaction, please tell me, and I will fix it.

I qualify myself as an adept gamer, I own several video game systems, and played tons of games, in fact, I’ve been playing video games as far as I can remember, so it is no foreign territory for me. Although I’m more into past generations, and I don’t have a expensive PC (it is a shitty mini laptop), so recent PC games aren’t in my play list.

Well, that’s enough of boring introductions, thanks for being here, I’ll start with some reviews.